Here’s a story I never thought I would be writing while still living in the United States.
The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office has ordered the seizure of four computers belonging to the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal. The government claims that reporters for the newspaper gained illegal access to a law enforcement web site after the Lancaster County coroner gave them the password to the web site.
Both the reporters and the coroner deny they did anything wrong.
State agents also raided the coroner’s home and seized computers there.
“This is horrifying, an editor’s worst nightmare,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. “For the government to actually physically have those hard drives from a newsroom is amazing. I’m just flabbergasted to hear of this.”
The grand jury is investigating whether the Lancaster County coroner gave reporters for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal his password to a restricted law enforcement Web site. The site contained nonpublic details of local crimes. The newspaper allegedly used some of those details in articles. — Philadelphia Inquirer
The newspaper fought the case all the way to the state Supreme Court, which refused to hear it.
The coroner called the situation “goofy.” I’ve got much stronger words for it.
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Don Dunbar
Mar 15, 2006
Yeah, I have a long string of words to say about that
too, but being the gentleman that I am, I refuse to.
It is a really fouled-up world that we are in right at
the moment, and from the looks and sounds of things, it
is not going to get better any time soon.
forstand
Mar 15, 2006
Backup, backup, backup and keep at least one copy off site, preferably out of the country. Geeze, there might be a business opportunity here. Let’s see if I can think of a country or two who might defy this country’s legal system; wow, too many countries flooded my mind.
I know of one major news site that does exactly that. I use SD cards. SD cards are up to two gigs of memory now and are very hard to find if I wanted to hide one or two filled with my data. I saw where sixteen gig was in pre-production.
I use eraser ( http://eraser.heidi.ie ) in Windows and shredder in SuSE Linux (where I am typing this now) to totally destroy any and all files rather than just deleting them.
Soon I will be using TOR ( http://www.torproject.org/ ) in Linux and similar in Windows to prevent Google & the government backtracking my queries about George Jr’s illegal activities and so on. I believe the ability to backtrack queries is the reason the government is seeking Google’s database. George Orwell would be agast at this late version of 1984′s thought police. He tried to warn us!
Paul Forgey
Mar 15, 2006
I like the auditable, open source filesystem encryption driver called TrueCrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/. Use it or something equivalent for your platform, but be wary of closed source projects if your are worried about government or corporate adversaries.
Here’s a very paranoid way to treat sensitive data.. Store a file containing the key to the encrypted portion of your hard drive (called a keyfile) on a removable thumbdrive. And encrypt that too inside a small encrypted volume on the thumbdrive with a passphrase. This means you now need what you have (the thumbdrive) and what you know (the passphrase to the thumbdrive) to access the protected partition of your hard drive. When the authorities, ninjas, alpacas, whom or what ever come, flush the thumbdrive down the toilet. Now it is cryptographically improbable to recover the data you are protecting. Of course, you no longer have access to it either so make sure it’s worth the sacrifice! Most people work out a scheme somewhat lesser than this but it shows that very important data can be effectively protected with discipline.
All sensitive information should be treated with some level of paranoia. NEVER just leave it hanging around in the clear. Remember that user based conditional access works only within the confines of your operating system. If your data being read by other means like subpoenaing your hard drive is a concern, ENCRYPT IT. Then just hope you aren’t found in contempt of court and in jail for every day you can’t produce the thumbdrive you flushed down the toilet..
tj
Mar 16, 2006
that’s scary … yet not totally unexpected. we lose more and more freedoms every single day. yet the media does little. people do nothing. and the government doesn’t care because it’s in charge. sad.
RvnPhnx
Mar 20, 2006
I see how nobody has yet made note of the fact that this seizure was unnecessary. That’s right, it is not needed to get the job done. All that is needed to prove wrongdoing (but not whom did it) are the webserver logs–and those are on a machine already owned by an organ of the state. The rest of the information needed could be easily gathered via a simple warrant or subpeona. No hardware seizure required.
I’m guessing that some moron probably “let” an unauthorized workstation (but perhaps not an unauthorized worker) access the website–and they are now pulling this shit to cover their tracks.